The deal with the water being added is in fact designed to melt the ice. As the ice melts, it brings the whole volume of water down to near freezing. It won't ever get there because the wort is add heat. However, without the water, ice that is nowhere near the coil just sits there doing nothing.

adding water allows full contact to the coil adding salt to the ice water allows it to cool quicker and lower then what would be normal. think the cheap fast method of cooling beer in a hotel room on spring break. bags of ice/bathtub/beer/salt

One of the best heat transfer fluids on the planet is water (and molten salts but that is more of a chemical engineering thing than a homebrewing thing). As others have pointed out you want all of your ice to melt thereby absorbing the latent heat of fusion from the wort. Ice works because of phase change not because it is cold. It takes 4.814 Joules to heat (or cool) one gram of water 1C but it takes 333.55 Joules to melt one gram of water (change from 0C and solid to 0C and liquid).

A little clarification to avoid others not as geeky as us getting confused.

The latent heat of fusion is the energy required to convert water from ice at 32°F to liquid water at 32°F. That's what ChemE meant by phase change.

So, cooling 5 gallons at 100°C (212°F) to 70°F (21°C) requires that you dissipate 7,113,243 joules of energy. i.e. Melt 47.5# of ice. That's not very feasible, so we better find a way to get rid of that extra energy. Hence the need for for the IC

Assuming we just melted 16# of ice, we have 4,719,131j more to get rid of. Break out the IC...

Linked here from another thread. This is essentially what I'd thought of as well, you are using a post-chiller for your wort, this one is just all combined in one bucket. At this point I think my plan will be similar, but have the CFC sit on top of the bucket, and only have the bare copper coils of the secondary chiller inside the bucket. I like this since it will be assisted with gravity through the whole system (no tubes going back up) and the ice will not be melted by the warmer tap water going through the hose and all the cooling power will be directed at cooling the wort in the bare copper coil.

The only other difference I think I'll make is adapt it so that I can run boiling wort through the whole system for the last 10 minutes of the boil to sanitize everything really well, then I'll dump in my ice and water in the bucket, and start transferring wort to the fermenter.

I'll make a thread with my version when I'm done. By the way for some reason I am not able to see any of the pictures in this thread, any chance you can attach a picture instead of linking?

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Just to pump up the nerd factor of the thread, wouldn't all the energy from the phase change now be stored in the cold water and therefore still available to cool the wort (and more readily because of better contact?)? So you shouldn't really worry about the added water melting the ice, right?

I consider myself pretty sharp, but this forum constantly teaches me new things.

Yes as the ice melts it will cool the water, which then should cool the copper tube. The other issue is you will have ambient heat coming in through the walls of your bucket, perhaps this is best built in a 2-3 gallon cooler of some type, but that's going too far, you won't loose too much in the few minutes used to cool the wort.

I plan on having a 5 gallon bucket of water sitting in my fermentation freezer at 34 degrees that I'll use with ice in the cooling bucket. I'm usually done with my last brew fermenting, or crash cooling it for transfer at that point.

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"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people." - V

I felt that rubber was a pretty good insulator so there would be little temp transfer through the rubber hose. I put it all in a bucket for convenience in carrying it to the brewsite. The small uphill travel from the CFC to the secondary is negligible due to the fact that the weight of the wort traveling down through the coiled secondary is far greater than the weight of the wort traveling uphill. Thus flow through the secondary coil pulls the wort up the small uphill climb.
Sach made a point of the 12 minute pass. This is with a pump. without a pump it still gravity flows quite well but a little slower. It also drops the temps to lagering range.
I will try to attach a couple pics. I'm still learning the basics.

Con, I couldn't locate the manage attachments button but I did put them in my gallery. hope that helps

I would avoid using salt in this - no real need for it, and it has a strong tendency to corrode your copper. However, it certainly is benefical to use pre-cooled water, since warmer water will just use ice.

In running an ice cream freezer where you really do need the salt, and just have to deal with the corrosion over time, it is HUGELY beneficial to have a gallon (or slightly less, depending) of extremely salty water stored in a freezer - cuts the time needed to freeze a 4 quart batch in half, at least. Lay in ice and salt as usual, then pour in enough pre-cooled brine (at 0F or whatever your freezer is set to) until it overflows and things move right along, rather than having to wait until the brine makes itself from ice and salt. At the end of freezing, collect a gallon of the brine, and add to it any un-dissolved salt - you want this brine to always be saturated with salt, with extra salt on the bottom.

BeerThirty - Thanks for the pictures and info, I appreciate you posting this and sharing ideas on it. I'll be building my own version of this and using it in my system. Unfortunately I won't have the new system up and running for a while since I am building a brew rig in my garage (natural gas, pump etc) but when I do have it done and running I'll post some pictures and performance information (like you have).

The other nice thing about this setup is that since the cooling ice/water has little chance of dripping into the wort (like some ICs do) I will probably just shovel some snow into the bucket in the winter (if getting it down to lager pitching temps) since even then my city water is not at lagering temps. In the summer it will be great to just pump right to the fermenters and pitch the yeast.

I'll need to rig up something to easily see the temperature of the outflowing wort, then I can adjust the pump speed accordingly, currently I was just holding a sanitized digital thermometer in the flow.

Quote:

Originally Posted by beerthirty

I felt that rubber was a pretty good insulator so there would be little temp transfer through the rubber hose. I put it all in a bucket for convenience in carrying it to the brewsite. The small uphill travel from the CFC to the secondary is negligible due to the fact that the weight of the wort traveling down through the coiled secondary is far greater than the weight of the wort traveling uphill. Thus flow through the secondary coil pulls the wort up the small uphill climb.
Sach made a point of the 12 minute pass. This is with a pump. without a pump it still gravity flows quite well but a little slower. It also drops the temps to lagering range.
I will try to attach a couple pics. I'm still learning the basics.

Con, I couldn't locate the manage attachments button but I did put them in my gallery. hope that helps

__________________
"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people." - V